Teaching Engineers to Design for People, Not Despite Them

A Glimpse into Human-Centered Design in the Grainger First-Year Experience Program

When Dr. Alexander Pagano, Engineering Education Lead at Siebel Center for Design (SCD), talks about human-centered design, he starts with a bicycle. In the late 1800s, engineers chasing speed produced the penny-farthing: a towering, dangerous machine that was nearly impossible to ride, particularly for women in the era's fashionable long skirts. Then came the rover safety bike, a design that prioritized usability, and with it came something no one had planned for: the suffragette movement, shifting fashion norms, and a new era of women's independence. The innovations in technology didn't change the world; the shift in perspective did.

That story captures the heart of Pagano's work in collaboration with the Grainger College of Engineering, where he is partnering with Murillo Suranso, GFX Associate Director to embed human-centered design thinking into Engineering 100 through the Grainger First-Year Experience Program (GFX). GFX exists to help every incoming Grainger engineer build community, develop empathy, and create inclusive spaces from day one. Engineering 100 is the orientation course that sits at the center of that mission, and it is where Pagano sees the greatest opportunity for change.

His goal is not to replace traditional engineering methods, but rather to expand upon them. Engineering has its own deeply embedded design traditions, built over generations, and those traditions carry real value. But they also carry a blind spot.

One of the core problems he is pushing back against is what he calls the "black box". When a problem feels too complex, the engineering instinct is often to simplify it away. Gravity and drag get approximated. So, too, do users. The result is products that technically meet requirements but fail the people who have to live with them. Pagano points to an electric kettle as a small but telling example: design for a fixed boiling temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit, and you will produce a kettle that works perfectly in Chicago but never shuts off in Denver, where a higher altitude drops the boiling point. The elegant fix was to detect steam rather than temperature, a solution that only emerges when a designer thinks seriously about the full range of people and places a product will encounter.

Fostering that kind of thinking in engineering culture at scale requires more than a revised lesson plan, which is why the ELA training model is so central to this work. Each semester, around 100 undergraduate Engineering Learning Assistants are hired and trained to co-teach sections of Engineering 100 in the fall. This spring, Pagano began leading human-centered engineering workshops inside ENG 377, the course that prepares those ELAs before they ever step in front of a classroom. The ripple effect is significant: by reaching the instructors, the work reaches everyone they will teach. That expansion pushes SCD's reach from roughly 20 to 30 percent of the incoming freshman engineering class to an estimated 90 to 95 percent.

Pagano is also tracking what the work produces. Research assistants Emma Kirby and Yixing Wu are measuring student self-efficacy across areas like prototyping, empathy, and stakeholder engagement. Students entering with low confidence in hands-on building show a significant increase of up to 40 percent after a single project-based course. The numbers offer proof of something Pagano has long believed: this approach works, and it can scale.

Perhaps most importantly, he sees this work as a chance to change who belongs in engineering in the first place. By shifting the field's focus from mathematical aptitude to human impact, he believes engineering can attract people who want to help, not just people who love equations. The field has room for both, and it needs both.

The bicycle changed the world not because it was fast. It changed the world because it was finally designed with the user in mind.